Product Information

Release Date:

August 1, 1983

Date Published:

August 1, 1983

details

Returning to St. Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naive Prince Myshkin - known as 'the idiot' - pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General, his wife and his three daughters. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly infatuated with her, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal and, finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky set out to portray the purity of 'a truly beautiful soul' and to explore the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world.

Dostoyevsky wanted to create a portrait of a "good man" in Prince Myshkin, a Christlike figure who is the heir to a large fortune and whose simple goodness has a profound impact on those around him. Myshkin's saintly impulses occasionally backfire, as when the prostitute Natasha, believing he loves her, is devastated to learn his love is only pity; she runs away with the evil Rogozhin, who murders her. At times the plot reads like a thriller, though throughout the novel Dostoyevsky probes the meaning of human suffering and the nature of true compassion. In spite of the fact that he felt he didn't achieve his stated goal, THE IDIOT was Dostoyevsky's favorite among his novels.